Introduction
The Gold and Green Route
Discussion
Academics primary reasons for publishing include (Stack, 2016):
- pursuing their career goals and moving up in the academic post positions.
- researching to be published, in order to attract attention and gain credit for their work. Both quantity and quality which is required to achieve the aim of gaining citations, which add merit (Jobs,2014).
- researching in order to make a meaningful contribution towards existing literature.
The pressure to publish stems from the need to attract more funding in order to pursue further research into the field. Academics, gain publicity and attention through the number of their publications and they get a yearly allowance to do so. This enables them to attend conferences and pay for the relevant resources required.
Believe it or not, attending a conference as an academic speaker can be costly and in many cases the funding allowance barely covers this. Therefore, publications are seen as a source of income and can help to increase job security. However, if publications are made freely available they may gain an increased number of citations, but then who would assess and review the work to test its legitimacy?
Scholarly information and academic research have a direct financial cost to fund researchers whether it be from a private or public entity. The argument for all public research to be made freely available is that in theory it is the taxpayer funding research so why should they have to pay twice? Should it not be freely available? The Government conducted research and found that it could cost up to £60 million a year to make publically funded research freely available (JHA, 2012).
By freely uploading documents and materials and allowing open access to the content, producers lose the financial value in the work produced, as publishers will not want to issue the research as it is already freely available. Furthermore, even if certain materials are published in journals, the author is sometimes required to pay a fee to publish their work due to the prestige. Then again, if the government were to step up, the world wide web could be used more efficiently to spread information and allow for academics to gain fulfilment that their work is being built on or even gaining from the benefits to the non-academic dissemination of their work (Tennant et al, 2016).
Advantages and Disadvantages:
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Introduction references:
Nikhil Anand's Blog 